From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Alexander Ross (c.1590-1654) was a prolific Scottish writer and controversialist. He was born in Aberdeen. He was vicar of Carisbrooke in the Isle of Wight from 1634 to his death. He was also chaplain to the ill-fated King Charles I, who was executed by the Puritan army leaders in 1649 during the English Civil War. As an associate of Archbishop Laud, who was executed by the Puritan parliament in 1645, Ross might have come under threat, but he seems not to have been persecuted by the new regime.

One of Ross's most significant accomplishments, published in the same year as the beheading of the king, was his complete translation of the Qur'an into English, named L'Alcoran de Mahomet. Although he knew no Arabic and only poorly translated the French translation of Du Ryer, his translation was the first in English, and his influence faintly lingers in latter-day translations down to the present.

He attacked Thomas Browne (defending, for instance, the beliefs that crystal is a sort of fossilized ice, and that garlic hinders magnetism),[1] the Copernican theory, and many other contemporary ideas.

As one of the Aberdeen doctors, he is commemorated in the Calendar of saints of the Scottish Episcopal Church on March 28.

• L'Alcoran de Mahomet
• Rerum Judaicarum Libri Duo (1617)
• Questions and Answers on the First Six Chapters of Genesis (1620)
• Tonsor ad cutem Rasus (1629)
• Commentum de Terrae Motu Circulari Refutatus (1634)
• Virgilii Evangelisantis Christiados Libri xiii (1634), a cento composed entirely from Virgil
• The New Planet, no Planet, or the Earth no Wandering Star, against Galilaeus and Copernicus, (1640)
• God's House, or the House of Prayer, vindicated from Profaneness (1642) sermons
• God's House made a Den of Thieves (1642) sermons
• Philosophical Touchstone, or Observations on Sir Kenelm Digby's Discourse on the Nature of Bodies and of the Reasonable Soul, and Spinosa's Opinion of the Mortality of the Soul, briefly confuted (1645)
• Medicus Medicatus, or the Physician's Religion cured (1645)
• The Picture of the Conscience (1646)
• Mystagogus Poeticus, or the Muses' Interpreter (1647)
• The Alcoran of Mahomet: Translated out of Arabique into French by the Sieur Du Ryer, Lord of Malezair, and Resident for the King of France at Alexandria, and Newly Englished for the Satisfaction of All That Desire to Look into Turkish Vanities, to Which is Prefixed the Life of Mahomet, ... with a Needful Caveat, or Admonition, for Those Who Desire to Know What Use May Be Made of, or If There Be Danger in Reading, the Alcoran (1649)
• Enchiridium Oratorium et Poeticum (1650)
• Arcana Microcosmi, or the Hid Secrets of Man's Body discovered, in Anatomical Duel between Aristotle and Galen; with a Refutation of Thomas Browne's Vulgar Errors, from Bacon's Natural History, and Hervey's book De Generatione (1651)
  • Web version of the text
• The History of the World, the Second Part, in six books, being a Continuation of Sir Walter Raleigh's (1652)
• Pansebia, or View of all the Religions in the World, with the Lives of certain notorious Hereticks (1652)
• Observations upon Hobbes's Leviathan (1653)
• Animadversions and Observations upon Sir Walter Raleigh's History of the World (1653)
• Three Decads of Divine Meditations, whereof each one containeth three parts. 1. History. 2. An Allegory. 3. A Prayer. With a Commendation of a Private Country Life.
• Four Books of Epigrams in Latin Elegiacs
• Mel Heliconium, or Poetical Honey gathered out of the Weeds of Parnassus
• Melisomachia
• Colloquia Plautina
• Chronology, in English
• Chymera Pythagorica

• Significant Scots: Alexander Ross